Calculating NOI for Real Estate and How to Start Investing with $70K (Rookie Reply)

Ashley:
Let’s get your questions answered. My name is Ashley Kehr and I’m here with Tony J Robinson.

Tony:
And this is the podcast here to help you kickstart your real estate investing journey. And today we’re diving back into the BiggerPockets Forum to get your questions answered. Now guys, the forums of the absolute best place to quickly get all of your real estate investing questions answered by experts like me, Ashley, and so many others. So what are we going to talk about today? We’ve got a couple of things here. Number one, we’re going to talk about how to calculate your NOI as a first time investor. We’re going to talk about a tenant who has some appliance issues and whether or not you as the landlord should get those fixed for them. And then we’ll finish off by talking about how to get started in real estate with $70,000. Now, before we jump in, we want to give a quick thank you to Corporate Direct. This episode is sponsored by Corporate Direct where you can protect your properties with an LLC and let corporate direct take care of the paperwork. Go to biggerpockets.com/direct for a free 15 minute consultation and 100 bucks off if you mention the Real Estate Rookie podcast. Now, let’s get into the show.

Ashley:
Okay, so our first question here is pulled from the BiggerPockets forums and this question says, hi, I’m a first time investor trying to underwrite to make an all cash offer on a duplex. I’ve always struggled with coming up with operating expenses to calculate my NOI my net operating income, specifically maintenance and insurance. I can find out pretty easily what the property taxes and I can shop around or just guess about 8% to 10% property management fees. But insurance and maintenance is where the NOIs calculation can really confused me. The duplex is located in the Midwest, no flood zone. Is there a landlord policy or what should I actually be shopping for? Also, what should be taken into account when coming up with maintenance for the NOI equation? Okay, so let’s start at the first top of that question of calculating NOI. If you need help figuring out what specifically to add in as expenses to calculate your operating income, you can go to BiggerPockets and go to the calculator reports where it will show you, depending on what strategy you’re using.
If you’re doing a rental, let’s use that for an example. It’ll show you exactly everything you need to analyze a rental property and what kind of expenses you should be looking at. The person that asked this question said they already kind of know they can look up property taxes, which most often you can do online or you can get the actual tax bills from the seller of the property, or sometimes it’s even listed in the MLS listing. Then they did their research for the property management fees. But insurance and maintenance is where they’re getting confused insurance. I will 100% agree it is difficult to estimate, especially on your very first rental property, what the insurance will be because it’ll be different than your homeowner’s insurance because there’s oftentimes more liability because you are a landlord on the policy, but maybe you won’t have as much coverage. So first thing I think to take into account is that it’s really going to vary upon what type of coverage you get onto the property. So are you going to do replacement costs? What other things are on the property that could increase the insurance premium? Is there a pool? Did the tenants have a trampoline on there? Things like that. So Tony, what would you say is your best advice for estimating the insurance on a property?

Tony:
I totally understand where this question’s coming from as well, but honestly I feel like it’s an easier solution than most people give it credit for. You can reach out to an insurance agent and a lot of times same day, they can get back to you with some sort of quote on what they think insurance might be. So if I’m looking in a market, I’m going to reach out, maybe ask your agent, your real estate agent, maybe ask your lender, Hey, who’s a good insurance agent that works in this market? Reach out to that person, say, Hey, I’m thinking about buying three different properties and give them a duplex, give ’em a single family home, give ’em whatever it is else that you’re looking at and say, Hey, can you give me some ballpark quotes on what it’ll cause to insure these? And within a day, maybe a day or two, you can get back some ballpark quotes on what it’ll cause to ensure those things. And now you can kind of use that as a foundation moving forward. So super easy way I think is to just reach out to an agent. And worst case, you can probably go online besides, I don’t know, some of these big insurance companies, Geico, progressive, whoever, punch in some information there and they might be able to give you a quick ballpark online within minutes.

Ashley:
Yeah, the only problem with that is that then you have to input your phone number and then you get a million calls call.

Tony:
It’s like when you apply for a mortgage,

Ashley:
Yeah, have accurate insurance premium numbers for your analysis. It might be worth it to get those phone calls. But yeah, there’s a bunch of different websites that you can go in and you can get a quote. Another thing you can do too is go into the BiggerPockets forums, ask other investors in that market what they’re paying for insurance premiums too. And then I would just increase that and give yourself a little bit of a buffer in case there is something that’s specifically different about your property as far as the coverage of that too.

Tony:
The only other thing I’d add to the insurance piece is also just be aware of where that state is moving in terms of insurance. For example, I’m in California, there are a lot of insurance providers that are leaving California for risk of fire and they’re just not coming back. I was actually talking to someone I know who lives here in Southern California and they had on their primary residence, all of the insurance providers have left. The only coverage they have to choose now is the state sponsored insurance, and it was like $15,000 a year, which is insane for where we’re at here in California. So just make sure that you’re kind of keeping tabs on, hey, is insurance costs kind of getting crazy in this market or is it still pretty reasonable in comparison to the rest of the country?

Ashley:
That’s a great point. And part of the question of this too was does he get a landlord policy? What should he actually be shopping for? And if it is going to be a rental, you’ll want a landlord policy that will cover the property, the building. So the property were to burn down, you would get money to replace that property. Most of the times the landlord policy will not cover any contents or personal items of your tenants. So you could add appliances on there if you own the appliances to that policy, but that’s why it’s important to have your renters have renters insurance because if a devastation occurred, your policy would not cover their contents, which makes sense because you are paying for the policy and not them. So they should get their own. And then the liability piece is a huge thing of the landlord policy because if your tenant does get hurt in your property or does decide to sue you for some reason, you have the liability piece, not just the property coverage on the property.

Tony:
Sorry, you brought something up to you. Ash, as you were saying, liability and what that looks like. I think one of the best things you can do as a rookie is just get multiple quotes and then ask the agent to compare those quotes for you, especially if you’re a first time real estate invest. Even for me, sometimes reading through these is like, what does this mean? What are you saying? What does this actually come with? So take whatever quote you get from these different companies. Say you get three quotes, take all three quotes to insurance provider A and say, Hey, can you compare your quote with these other two and let me know what differences you see. Then take those same through quotes to insurance provider B and then insurance provider C and let them look through what the other coverage options are and actually explain to you why theirs may or may not be the best. But I found a lot of value in putting that work back on the insurance agent.

Ashley:
And I really like going with an insurance broker that shops it out for you too to different insurance companies instead of just an insurance agent. For one company like Geico State Farm, they’re a broker where they can actually shop a whole bunch of different, and a lot of times they’ll know, already know from experience that this company is going to give you the best deal because they love ensuring duplexes and they always have great coverage and blah, blah, blah. Stuff like that can save you some time. So the next piece of this is the maintenance factor, estimating maintenance. So for me, I’m definitely looking at the age of the property, was this property rehabbed, updated, how old are the mechanics of the property? Things like that as to how much I’m allocating as far as a percentage to estimate for maintenance. So on the high side that could be eight to 10% a month. On the low side, I usually always at least put 5% for maintenance. I’ve never built or purchased a brand new build that was a rental property. So maybe in that case you could even go lower for the first several years of not having a lot of maintenance come up. But that’s kind of where I keep my balance at is if it’s an older property, I’m doing eight to 10% and if it’s been remodeled and rehabbed and the mechanics are good, then I’m doing 5% that I’m allocating every month to maintenance.

Tony:
Honestly, not much to add to that. Ash, I think you hit the nail on the head with that one. Those are pretty much the same ballpark figures we use as well.

Ashley:
Okay. So kind of the last piece of this to wrap up here is what are other things that you can use to calculate the NOI and stuff? And I think that just the answer to that is really just go to the BiggerPockets and go to the calculator reports and just look at all of the expenses that you can allocate in there. Tony, besides as far as operating expenses, do you think there’s anything offhand maybe for short-term rental that you see that oftentimes people leave out? One example is bookkeeping fees. You’re going to have to pay either an accountant to file your taxes every year or a bookkeeper to do the monthly bookkeeping. I see a lot of people leave that out of their not operating income. Is there anything else that you notice that maybe he should be taking into account?

Tony:
Yeah, the two biggest ones that I probably see are consumables. So things like your toilet paper, paper towels, body wash, soap, shampoo, et cetera. People tend to forget that. And then the other piece that people tend to forget is your cleaning fees. Now, your cleaning fees, they are an expense that you pay out, but they’re also income that you collect. And it’s important to account for both of those when you’re doing your analysis because sometimes you might collect more in cleaning fee income than you do in cleaning fee or than you pay out in cleaning fee expenses. So there’s actually some margin there, but cleaning fees and consumables are the two things that typically see people miss on the short term side.

Ashley:
Before we jump into our second question rookies, we want to thank you so much for being here and listening to the podcast. As you may know, we air every episode of this podcast on YouTube as well as some original content like my new series Ricky Resource. We want to hit 100,000 subscribers and we need your help. If you aren’t already, please head over to our YouTube channel. You can go to ww.youtube.com at realestate rookie and subscribe to our channel. Okay everyone, welcome back. So for our second question, Tony pulled one out of the real estate rookie Facebook group, right?

Tony:
I did. And it was a question that Ash and I both separately had looked at and we were like, this seems like a good question. It seems like the universe is talking to us here. So let me pull up this question and we can all read it together. Alright, so here’s a question. It says it’s been a while since I posted, but I need to vent. I have a tenant that submitted a maintenance request this morning because the outlet to the refrigerator stopped working when another vendor moved the refrigerator in the ticket. They said that they have plugged the refrigerator into another outlet using an extension cord. He then told me that he wanted someone out there to fix the problem by 5:00 PM today or else he’ll have his friend come and fix it and just bill me. I don’t even know if this friend is a certified electrician or the company that he’s representing.
I have my electrician that can come out after five 30, which is still same day service. He told me that he’s going to call the county inspector, the city inspector, all this because I won’t let his friend work on my property and he wants me to pay for the Thanksgiving food that is in the refrigerator. Is it me or is this tenant potentially being unreasonable? I feel like it always gets a little dicey when we’re talking about Thanksgiving dinner. People want to protect the Turkey, so we got an outlet that’s gone out. But I think the interesting part here, and maybe we need a little bit more clarity here, but it says that the outlet stopped working when another vendor moved the refrigerator. So I’m not sure what that means, but I guess maybe I’m interpreting that as the tenant themselves hired someone to move the fridge and that somehow led to this outlet going out or are you reading that in a different way, Ash?

Ashley:
Yeah, so when I was looking at that, and I don’t know for sure if it was somebody the tenant hired to come in, maybe they already had someone in there doing maintenance on something. But either way I just look at this and I’m looking at the timeframe as in this is taken care of, same day there shouldn’t be this big of an issue. And I think it really goes back to setting your expectations. So Ashley Wilson, she owns a whole bunch of apartment complexes and one thing I love in her property management model is that when you move into one of her properties, she has almost like an expectation sheet that she gives out to all the tenants. That it’s if you have a plumbing issue, it’ll be taken care of within 24 hours if you have a handyman issue, 48 hours, whatever it may be.
And it goes through this whole list of things of maintenance issues that could come up and it says, we’ll take care of it within X amount of time. And she said this is over and above what it actually takes them. So say for example, if the hot water tank isn’t working and they say we will take care of this within 48 hours, she knows that they will actually always be able to take care of this in 24 hours. So there’s this expectation and then when they exceed the expectation, it makes them look even better and the tenant more appreciative that it was taken care of even faster than what they agreed to upon signing the lease. So if there’s some way that when you create your lease agreement is to putting into your lease stating this is when maintenance will be performed and these are the timeframes.
If we cannot get someone to you in a timely manner, then yes, that is our fault. We’ll decrease your rent or do something like that. But same day service. And I don’t think that you should fret, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned is for someone to harass you and to threaten you that they’re going to have someone coming in and take it. What’s going to happen in this situation is if they bring someone else in, they pay that person, they’re probably going to withhold rent, they’re going to pay you for whatever is extra for rent, and then you’re going to come after them and say, Hey, you still owe me the rest of rent. They’re going to say, no, we had to pay this electrician to fix your problem. And then it comes down to is it worth you hiring an attorney to send them a notice saying that you have passed you rent?
We’re going to go after the eviction process. So depending on the amount, it may not even be worth having an attorney start an eviction process or sending them notice that they’re in lease violation because they haven’t paid their lease or in lease violation because they had a contractor come in that wasn’t certified. So it really does get messy, but I think the biggest thing is is that remaining calm, I’ve been in so many circumstances where I’ve just wanted to freak out, but remaining calm and just overly effectively communicate with the resident. And I think what was the timeframe in here? There was like 5:30 PM when the person actually got there.

Tony:
Yeah, five 30 versus five.

Ashley:
And as far as the food and everything in the fridge, at some point it gets to the thing of, you know what, I will give you a $20 gift card to the grocery store or something like that if you really just want to make this tenant happy and the problem go away. But also you don’t want to get into that area where now they’re always going to expect different things. So we actually had in our lease agreement for a long time, if we weren’t able to get your fridge or freezer repaired, we would reimburse you for ice and for a cooler if it was such a certain amount of time. So it was still on the resident to go and get the cooler, get the ice or whatever, which still is a huge inconvenience to them. But we had that in the lease agreement so that they were signing and saying, yes, I agreed to this.
If my appliance is not working and we can’t get someone out to fix the appliance or replace it that same day, then that’s where we’re going to reimburse you for that. And we had a circumstance one time, I remember where it was over a weekend and we literally could not get anyone to this person’s place. And we ended up, they had the receipt from their last grocery trip and we did cover that whole thing. So sometimes it comes down to is it really worth fighting over $40 if that’s what they’re asking for? So there’s a lot to take into account, but I would say that this person is very over the top if they do not think that you are taking care of this in a timely manner.

Tony:
Lemme ask a few follow-up questions actually. Well first I love the point you made about setting expectations. I think so much of being, whether it’s short-term, long-term, midterm, whatever it is, anytime you have someone staying at your property, so much of how smooth that relationship goes is dependent upon your ability to set and keep expectations, right? Set realistic expectations and exceed those. I was actually talking to someone the other day and he had, it’s a short-term rental that he hads and the previous guest smoked inside the house, which is not allowed based on his house rules. And they left a cigarette burn, small little cigarette burn inside of the pool table. And he’s like, yeah, the cleaner said it kind of smelled the smoke. So he had a guest checking in, I think the next day he ended up canceling that reservation. He’s like, I just didn’t want them to walk in and be shocked by the smoke.
And I was like, I get why you’re doing that. I was like, but you just lost out on how much money by canceling that reservation. I think a better thing would’ve been to let them know, just be honest with them. Say, Hey, look guys, I’m super excited to host you this weekend. Unfortunately, the guests who just checked out didn’t leave the place in the best shape. We’re going to make sure it’s all tip top and clean for you when you get here. However, there may be some lingering smoke smell potentially by the time you guys get there. If you want to cancel, hey, no harm, no foul, but if you want to stay, I’ll give you guys a small discount for the inconvenience. Are you okay with that? And if you were to frame it up that way, now they’re not going to be upset because the smoke smell is there. They’re going to be upset if the smoke smell is there and they weren’t notified beforehand if they’re surprised by it. But if you can set that expectation, it makes everything so much easier. So I love that you set the expectation, Pete.

Ashley:
Well, Tony, on that note real quick, how you just said, for as a short-term rental as an example, as in you’re in the hospitality industry and you’re going to do what you can to make your guests accommodate them. And I think that is something that gets so construed looking at long-term rentals and short-term rentals that in short-term rentals more often you want to make the person happy, you want to make them feel home, you want to be at service for them. What extra things can we do for them? And there is such a stigma as a long-term landlord that, oh, you got to stick to your guns, they pay you rent, you do the maintenance, what you have to do, not anything extra. And I think sometimes it is so vastly different. If this was a short-term rental tenant that was staying in your property and the fridge didn’t work, wouldn’t you be instead of saying like, oh, I’m in the right, this is okay, I feel like you would’ve taken this, this would’ve been a whole different question. It would’ve been completely phrased differently. And I think that’s sometimes maybe we should look at our long-term rentals more as a customer based business and think like, oh, it’s okay to actually give them some money or to accommodate them, things like that too. But

Tony:
I think the difference, I think there’s probably two big differences. Number one is that every single person that stays at one of my Airbnbs has the ability to write a public review afterwards. And in the long-term rental space, I mean, I don’t know, maybe they could go on if you have a Google page or something. But typically there’s no way for one tenant to communicate with the next. And then the second piece is that obviously there’s typically more revenue generated by short-term rentals. So if we give a guest 50 bucks, that’s a very small percentage of our profit for that month. Whereas if I have a long-term rental, say I’m netting maybe 200 bucks, that’s what 25% of the revenue that I just potentially collected, right with that $50 refund. So I do believe there’s some nuance here, but I couldn’t agree more that putting the tenant, putting your resident as the focus in the long term will probably help you grow and build a bigger business.

Ashley:
There’s this book, it’s by Jay Bayer, I think that’s his name, and it’s called Hug Your Haters. And it is all about customer service and how to kill people with kindness and how to handle people, especially when they are a tenant that has a complaint or is upset about something. It’s a really great read for a landlord. It’s built more for like if you have a business and people are leaving you bad reviews and things like that, how to handle that and how to respond. But it is great for tenant customer satisfaction too. Okay, so let’s move into our second ad break because we love talking about real estate and we love answering questions like this with you all and we’d love for you to hit the follow button on your podcast app wherever you are listening. So we’re going to take one final break and we’ll be back with our last question.
So back from our break and we have one last question. Hi, my spouse and I are both the W2 employees. Most of our savings have been parked in the s and p 500. We wanted to diversify into real estate investing and thus came into this forum. Well welcome. I’ve seen some of the resources online and it’s a bit overwhelming. Can you please share any resources or advice on how to get started in real estate investing? Here’s a few details about US savings available for investing 70,000. Our current residence is renting in the Northeast. We haven’t bought yet because our rent is super low, 30 KA year. Geographical preference to buy anywhere in the us but would prefer to avoid West Coast. Current W2 income is 250 K per year. How much time can I dedicate to this? It is 10 hours per week. Okay. I don’t know if this question has been asked before or if my information is relevant, but I’m a fast learner and highly motivated to invest in this space to diversify my assets and get some extra cashflow on the side. Thanks. Well, first of all, welcome to BiggerPockets and welcome to Real Estate Rookie. We’re really excited that you are a new rookie investor wanting to get into investing.

Tony:
I think first they’ve got a pretty decent profile here, right? 250 KA year in income, only 30 KA year in rent expense and 70 K saved. I would assume on that income you could probably save a good chunk every single month as well. Like that income to your rent, assuming that everything else is kind of I balance as well. So first, just kudos to you guys for I think laying a really solid foundation. But the question here is like, hey, if I’ve got 70 K in about 10 hours per week, what is a good strategy? Or maybe what’s a good way to get started? And I think we’ve set this quite a bit on the rookie podcast, but I think a lot of it comes down to your specific investment goals. Now she says that we want to diversify into real estate. So it’s good that there’s that initial motivation, but if we dig a few layers deeper, what is beyond the desire to diversify?
Are you looking to diversify into real estate so you can pay maybe less than taxes on that two 50 that you’re earning? Do you want to diversify into real estate just so that you have maybe a tangible asset that’s going to appreciate over time in a way that maybe stocks won’t? Do you want to diversify into real estate for the active cash flow so you can actually get some cash coming back into your pocket? I think depending on which one of those motivations, each kind of next step would be a little bit different. I dunno, what do you think Ash?

Ashley:
Yeah, I mean in the details about us, it did say they want to get some extra cashflow on the side so we know that’s at least somewhat of a priority and they want to not in the West coast. So kind of eliminating that space. I think one of the best places to start is to go into the BiggerPockets blog posts and you’ll find a whole bunch of different articles there based on cashflow and what are different markets, markets On the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast, they have done a couple episodes recently, like if I had a hundred thousand dollars to invest, what would I do with it? If I had $50,000 to invest, what would I do with it? Where would you invest the top markets for 2025? So I’d recommend going back and listening to those episodes with Dave Meyer and getting a gauge. So the first thing I would do is look at where other people are investing that are getting some cashflow that you want.
Then pick some of those markets and then go ahead and analyze them. Do a brief overview of those markets, make sure they’re going to be a good fit for you. So once say you pick Cleveland, Ohio, this is where I want to invest, that seems to have good cashflow. And also if you’re having 70,000, how much of that do you want for the down payment, the closing costs? Do you want to buy a house in all cash With that? Think about how comfortable you are with how much of that you want to spend and you want to keep some for reserves too. So let’s say you’re going to do a down payment, so you want to see what your budget is. So if you have to put 20, 25% down on an investment property, which is typical, how much is that? How much can you actually afford to buy with that down payment?
So that will help you narrow down which cities you can actually invest in too. Then you want to look at tenant landlord laws, which ones are maybe more tenant friendly that would be better for your rental? Narrow down some of these cities. Then once you actually decide on a city niche down into neighborhoods. So there’s some great websites like Neighborhood Scouts, pride Investor, where you can actually click on neighborhoods instead of just the city as a whole and see are people moving to this area even though a city may have decline. If you look at some of the suburbs, you might actually see the people in the city are moving to the suburb and from other places are moving into the suburbs. So there’s actually population growth going on there, but I just did a rookie resource video too on the real estate rookie YouTube channel, all about analyzing markets, how to find broadly across, decide on which market to invest in.
Then once you actually decide how to narrow down and what data to actually pull out of that market to analyze. And there’s two worksheets too that go along with these videos. So if you watch the videos, you’ll get the link too to actually pull up these and you can use these templates to actually go in and analyze. So that’s kind of like a starting point as to really figure out what your strategy is going to be, what your motivation is. If it’s cashflow, look at where other people are investing, what actually matches what you want to do, what’s your budget? Pick a city and then narrow down a niche into neighborhood. And that’s where you can go to the BiggerPockets agent finder and you can actually find an agent that works with investors in that neighborhood who can kind of be your boots on the ground and really help guide you through putting in offers and properties there.

Tony:
Yeah, actually that was a masterclass on kind of niching down and choosing the right markets. The only thing I’d add is BiggerPockets just have a tool to help, not just rookies, but all investors find new markets. So if you head over to biggerpockets.com/markets, the BP team has put together a phenomenal map-based resource with tons of information on different markets, rent to price, ratio of unemployment appreciation, population growth, et cetera. So lots of good data to help you choose your market. I think the one thing that I would consider, and I appreciate that she put in here, that she’s open to a lot of different geographical locations, but I think the mistake that we see with a lot of new investors is that they only choose cities based on either familiarity or proximity. And I’m not saying that you can’t start with those cities, but I see some new investors who almost force a market just because it’s closer, just because they’re familiar with it and not necessarily because it’s the best place for them to invest.
So my strong recommendation is to choose markets based on how well they align with your goals on how well they align with your resources. Not necessarily how close they are or how familiar you are with them already, but yeah, Ashley’s point of using the, I think seeing where other folks are investing is a big one. I think the other piece too, and we’re kind of assuming here that she wants to just get into the rental space. And maybe with that time commitment, 10 hours per week, maybe that actually is what makes the most sense for you. But I think maybe even an easier way to get started that we probably don’t talk about enough, but maybe it’s just lending money to other real estate investors. If you got 70 K, you lend that out 12%, maybe a point or two upfront, and you do that a couple times a year, that might be a great way to really quickly accelerate the growth of that 70 k from 70 to a hundred to one 20 to one 50. And you look up in a couple years and you’ve maybe double what you’ve been able to make. So just another potential avenue that would take way less time than actually gone there and getting your own real estate deal.

Ashley:
I think we need to do an episode on, as a rookie investor who wants to lend money, how do you do that? How do you protect yourself? What are the documents that need to be in place? In New York state, if you’re lending on a property and you want to lien on it, you have to file as a mortgage and you’re paying the mortgage tax on it, you’re paying fees. It is not convenient for someone to lend private money in New York. But we could kind of go through some of those examples of what it would look like, because as a rookie investor, you may have no idea how to go and purchase property, let alone how to lend someone money and make sure that you are protected and they just don’t run off with your money too. So that might be a good idea to do one of those. Well, if you want to get involved in the community like all these other real estate investors, go to biggerpockets.com/forums. Thank you so much for listening. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys on the next rookie reply.